From Slate Magazine · Jill Filipovic · · 3m
What we owe the dead of 9/11, and the dead after
A Senate candidate's 9/11 tweet was called disqualifying. Twenty-five years of numbers suggest he was just reading the record.
In brief
A Senate candidate's 9/11 tweet was called disqualifying. Twenty-five years of numbers suggest he was just reading the record. Counting the civilians killed by America's post-9/11 wars does not diminish the people killed on 9/11. It finishes the story. Originally reported by Slate Magazine.
A candidate built for controversy
Abdul El-Sayed is running for Senate in Michigan. He would be the first Muslim senator, he is on the party's left flank, and he is doing it in a state Trump won twice.
The old tweets come out
Every cycle brings the same ritual: dig up a candidate's archive, republish it, sometimes strip the context, and present it as the real person underneath.
The tweet in question
On the 20th anniversary, El-Sayed mourned the 3,000 killed in New York, then said he would spend the next day mourning the roughly one million killed in three countries.
“perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith … perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country”
That day was real trauma
The author watched the towers burn from an NYU dorm room, freshman year, days after moving to the city. Confusion first, then terror.
The city that stopped honking
New Yorkers went to the bars that night rather than sit scared at home. For days, the most aggressive drivers in America laid off their horns.
Grief turned into something else
The shared shock hardened and lost its focus. Afghanistan came first, a hunt for the man behind the attacks, and at the time it looked like a reasonable answer.
Then came Iraq
Weapons of mass destruction, Nigerien yellowcake, and a president's unfinished business with Saddam Hussein. Protesters marched down Fifth Avenue and it changed nothing.
“the guy who tried to kill my dad”
A war built on lies
The invasion deposed a brutal dictator on the back of faulty intelligence sold to a grieving public. The profits went to contractors and mercenary firms.
Afghanistan became a quagmire
Iraq drained the attention and money. Bin Laden slipped into Pakistan and lived almost another decade. The war ran 20 years.
The American cost
More than 2,000 US troops killed in Afghanistan and over 20,000 injured, nearly half the dead under 25. Iraq took about 4,500 service members and wounded 32,000.
The Afghan cost
Tens of thousands of civilians dead. Four million displaced inside the country, 2.7 million across borders. When the US left, the Taliban shut women out of school, work and health care.
“The country that had promised to fight for their freedoms swiftly abandoned them.”
Four million dead, mostly civilians
Around 200,000 Iraqi civilians killed. Across five countries, half a million died directly in the fighting and another 3.5 million from disease, hunger and wrecked infrastructure. Price tag: $1.6 trillion.
Terrorists count on the backlash
Inviting a brutal overreaction is the point. The attackers knew thousands of innocent Muslims would pay for a war waged in the name of their religion.
The moral high ground, squandered
By swinging from al-Qaida to Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration burned global sympathy and confirmed the story of America as a might-makes-right bully.
We attacked our own values
Torture programs, detention without charge or trial, surveillance of American citizens. The freedoms Americans held up as what made the country worth defending got hollowed out at home.
Say it on September 10th
Keep the anniversary for grief. Say the rest the day before and the day after, and name the officials who lied and were never held to account.
“part of the blame lies at the feet of some of the most powerful people in the world”
The headline
Counting the civilians killed by America's post-9/11 wars does not diminish the people killed on 9/11. It finishes the story.
